SO AS TIME WENT ON SO DID I. I had moved on, I had moved to Chicago and I had enrolled in Chicago University, when I graduated I became a journalist for a small newspaper and I had even been keeping up with Maggie, who insisted on being called Margret and was having a blast in the fifth grade. So you can imagine my surprise when I get a knock on my door from Brianna. I hadn’t seen her in ten years. I was twenty-nine and I looked the same as I did when I was twelve. Brianna was twenty-nine and looked like a different person. I couldn’t even recognize her until she introduced herself. She looked like she couldn’t have weighed more than eighty pounds. Her skin was paler than a vampire, and her hair went from a thick brown to a thin grayish brown. She also looked like she was forty-nine, not twenty-nine.


I invited her in for some coffee and as we talked, I could tell she hadn’t been doing well, even before she gave me the low down on what she had been doing the past ten years. She said that the reason she left was because she had been high on acid and went with some friends to, well, a place she couldn’t remember. After about two or three hours of just hanging out she fell asleep and when she woke up, everyone was gone. So she sort of hitch hiked for a while, before finding her way back home. When my parents said I had left she went to Garry’s, stupidly expecting to find some sort of comfort. They lived together for three years, and then he kicked her out when he got a new girlfriend. So then she went to the home of her daughter. When Margret’s foster parents refused to let her in she broke some of their windows (luckily Margret was at a friend’s house) and they got an order of protection against her. So she begged my parents to tell her where I was and eventually they told her. She said the reason I never found out about her asking where I was, was because she begged my parents not to tell me.



I let her stay at my apartment for a few days, until she decided what she was going to do. For the first two days it seemed like we were back to being best friends, only we could both feel the tension, like there was this huge wall that was blocking us from connecting like we used too.


On the third day while we were reminiscing and watching some crappy movie she got straight to the point, turning off the T.V. in preparation for telling me the main reason for why she came down here. I stood up from the couch and put down the bowl of popcorn we had been eating. She got up and pushed the popcorn to the other side of the table while she sat down on the table and faced me. I could see the eagerness in her eyes; like this was something she had needed to get off of her chest for some time. She stared at me and at the floor for a few minutes before saying, “I need you to help me get my daughter back.”



We talked for a long while and as it turned out she had gotten this whole thing planned out in her head, long before she had gotten here. She knew I had been talking to Margret and she knew that Margret’s foster parents had to have trusted me enough so that when I called asking Margret if she wanted to come and stay with me for a few days that they wouldn’t be able to say no.


“And that’s when we get her!” She said. Her voice and her eyes became more alive than I had seen them since she held Margret in her hands.



I told her I didn’t feel comfortable doing this but for the next two days that was all she could talk about. Everything that came out of her mouth was just another detail, another plan on what she would do when she got her baby again. On the fourth day (after she announced her plans) while I was making coffee she looked at me and said, “I cannot wait to get my Maggie.” And it was those seven words, that small sentence that seemed no more important than all of her other sentences she had said since deciding this plan that made me realize she was already dead. She was far past saving; if she ever got close to that sweet young girl all she would do was drag her down with her. Margret wasn’t Brianna’s little Maggie anymore. Margret had turned a corner; Margret should never have to deal with the unstableness of Brianna, nobody should.



So that's why I did what I did. I called the cops and told them about her drugs. They whisked her away without much question, she already had a record as long as my arm. It's been a few months, I haven't heard from her yet. But I don't think I will.